Chasing Hillary

by Amy Chozick

  But though Joel had some good ideas, he couldn’t calibrate his neurotic irascibility to present them to Hillary with the delicacy required, as if transporting a Fabergé egg on the Amtrak.

  Early on, Huma decided Joel’s personality “wasn’t a fit,” and from then on, Hillary mostly ignored the strategic advice of her chief strategist. She did, however, offer Joel some of her own advice, telling him after the Iowa caucuses, “I’ve seen you on TV, you’ve got to remember to sit up straight.” I preferred Joel’s cocky combativeness to Podesta’s removed nonchalance.

  “Why can’t she just promise to give people opportunities? Why the ‘ladders of opportunity’? What’s with the ladders?” I asked.

  Joel went from zero to ninety in 2.5 seconds. “Well, clearly you’ve never needed a ladder!”

  “I’ve needed ladders my whole life.”

  He shook his bearded head at me. “I don’t think so. I don’t think you’ve ever needed a ladder or you’d understand.”

  “Do you even know that I’m from Texas?”

  “That doesn’t mean you needed ladders. I’m from Queens!”

  “I’ve needed plenty of fucking ladders, Joel. I just don’t get the line.”

  And so on, until a journalism student whom I have nothing but hope for interrupted to ask me about internships at the Times. I gave him my card, turned back to Joel, who at this point was yelling, I think at MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt. (“What do you mean the ‘youth vote’? We’re winning with voters over thirty!”) I interrupted to say, “See? I just extended a ladder of opportunity.” He laughed.

  15

  “Fucking Democrats”

  Iowa, August 2015

  Clear Lake has a population of 7,700 people and sits in Cerro Gordo County, a perfect square of farmland in the middle of northern Iowa, approximately twelve hundred miles on either side from the ocean. I’d flown into Minneapolis and driven three hours to Clear Lake and was circling the parking lot outside the Surf Ballroom on a Friday afternoon in August. After covering the Iowa Democratic Wing Ding dinner, I had another two-hour drive, a dull straight shot down I-35 to Des Moines. What Clear Lake lacks in geographic proximity to the ocean, it makes up for with its famous surf-themed dance hall. The ballroom, lined with plastic palm trees and built-in vinyl furniture and murals of beach scenes designed to give off “the ambience of a South Sea island,” is frozen on the night of the Winter Dance Party in February 1959 when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper gave their last performance before their single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza crashed into a frozen cornfield in nearby Mason City and killed everyone on board.

  The speeches weren’t expected to start for at least another hour, and I wasn’t in a hurry to get out of the car and be tempted by the signature baked chicken wings (in spicy and mild). So I circled the parking lot a couple of times listening to the Don McLean song “American Pie.” That’s when the Hummer backed into me. There was the quick sound of crushed aluminum, the smell of Italian dressing from my Subway salad as it flew off the passenger seat and exploded on impact with the floor mat. The seat belt tugged at my chest so tight it nearly knocked the wind out of me. And then it was over. The Hummer inched forward.

  A man in his forties, with a goatee and broad shoulders that filled out his polo shirt, stepped out of his hunk of expensive steel and testosterone. He had a pair of mirrored sunglasses perched on top of his baseball cap, and I could see the reflection of my banged-up car in them. He didn’t apologize or ask if I was okay; he just slammed his car door, looked my way, and in the most visceral reminder of our divided politics, yelled, “Fucking Democrats!”

  Ever since high school when my friend Kate shot the finger at a GMC pickup and the driver followed us to the Sonic and waved his shotgun at us, I knew better than to antagonize an angry man in an expensive truck. I calmly explained that I wasn’t a Democrat, I was a journalist with the New York Times. I realized this must’ve sounded like a distinction without a difference to a liberal-hating Iowan, so I quickly dropped that I was from Texas.

  “Your family still there?” he asked.

  “Yep, my family is still in Texas,” I said.

  I often worked this into small talk while interviewing Everydays in the intercoastal states. It was code for I’m not what you think I am. I shop at the Bass Pro Shop, too. He exhaled, apologized. We exchanged emails and waited for the police. He said he owned the bar that shared a parking lot with the Surf Ballroom and invited me for a drink on the house, which was just about the last thing I wanted to do after he nearly killed me and left me with an undrivable rental car in a town 90 miles from the nearest Avis.

  By the time I got inside the ballroom and arranged for a tow truck and a replacement car from Minneapolis, Hillary was taking the stage in front of a bulky American flag, and I was trying to confirm whether she’d eaten a wing. “I believe she did sample the wings,” a press aide wrote. “But adding [Brown Loafers Guy] who can confirm all things wing related!” Brown Loafers referred me to a photo on Twitter of Hillary holding a Styrofoam plate of wings. “Does this mean she ate a couple?” I asked. No reply.

  Hillary proceeded to string together a miraculous series of “American Pie” puns. “As the song says, ‘I can still remember how that music used to make me smile’ . . . and if you’ll look around this room, all of you Democrats make me smile, too . . . It’s clear we’re ready to rock and roll.”

  Then, after a summer spent answering “WHAT ABOUT YOUR EMAILS?” Hillary made a joke about the server: “You may have seen that I recently launched a Snapchat account. I love it. I love it,” she said, wobbling her shoulders. “Those messages disappear all by themselves.”

  “You can’t joke about this stuff, once the FBI is involved,” Andrea Mitchell said on MSNBC. “Her latest dilemma is not a joke to backers who see her front-running numbers in the public opinion polls slipping,” a Chicago Tribune column read. USA Today ran an editorial titled Clinton Email Controversy Is No Laughing Matter. Florida senator Bill Nelson told the Associated Press, “I don’t think the campaign has handled it very well. I think the advice to her of making a joke out of it—I think that was not good advice.”

  Hillary was already having a bad summer. The email story wouldn’t go away. She’d developed such an early and enduring aversion to us that the organizers of her speech on voting rights in Houston alerted the Travelers in advance that there would be no opportunities to ask Hillary questions. “The speech is the interview.” Meanwhile, it seemed that everyone under thirty and in the entire borough of Brooklyn, where she’d leased an additional floor to make room for her expanding billion-dollar campaign, was Feeling the Bern.

  Even Hillary’s close girlfriends describe her as mercurial. Each morning, aides would announce Hillary’s mood as if it were the weather. Crabby with a chance of outburst . . . Hillary isn’t one of those politicians who can turn it on with ease when the cameras flash. She wore her discomfort all over her face, but especially in Iowa.

  She’d been in a terrible mood when the campaign’s digital team talked her into shooting a Vine video. After a brief shot of a chillary clinton beer koozie on an iced tea set up on the banks of the Cedar River, Hillary’s irritated face filled the screen, before she said with feigned goofiness, “I’m just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids.” The Travelers must’ve watched the five-second video at least a hundred times, howling louder each time we saw her windswept face overtake the screen. I’m just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids. Just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids.

  Months later, Ruby Cramer—the BuzzFeed reporter with whom I’d bonded after one of The Guys spotted us in a sea of several hundred FOBs at a Clinton Library barbecue in Little Rock and threw us out mid-po’boy—and I would almost miss the motorcade when Hillary made a stop at Raygun, a hipster T-shirt store in Des Moines. We couldn’t leave the store until we’d each bought a purple cotton T-shirt that said in white block letters i’m just chillin’ here in cedar rapids.

  In August, Maureen Dowd, the Ne
w York Times columnist and loveliest thorn in Hillary’s side, published her “Joe Biden in 2016: What Would Beau Do?” column revealing that Joe Biden’s dying son had urged him to run for president. I’d separately heard from Democrats and donors that Biden was seriously considering making a late entry into the race.

  I had a news story in the works about Biden taking steps to run. My editor, Carolyn, lit up over the potential scoop and the ensuing capital T, Tension, of Biden shaking up what looked like a Hillary coronation. Carolyn had this way of making all reporters desperate to please her. Or, as my colleague Michael Barbaro put it, “Ya gotta make Mamma happy.” There was nothing like the warmth of Carolyn’s sun when it shined on you—her single roar of a laugh that cut through any conversation, her inquisitive eyes bursting out of their sockets upon hearing about a juicy story, the praise she heaped on her reporters when they delivered something awesome. But when she went dark—casting her light on another colleague or hardly looking away from her screen in disappointment that we hadn’t brought her that killer quote or nailed down that delicious detail—life could be a cold, desperate place.

  I wanted to make Mamma happy, even if it meant The Guys would destroy me for it. I’d begun not to care as much about what they thought, partly because of Carolyn’s supernova support. But also because with the campaign in full swing, I had no shortage of stories to write and chatty sources informing me about the goings-on inside Brooklyn. I still wanted, more than anything, for Hillary to see me as a fair reporter, but The Guys’ threats about cutting off access had no coin since I could’ve filled the Times with daily front-page stories about Hillary’s altruistic work with women and girls, and she still wouldn’t have given me (or any beat reporter) real access. I had nothing to lose.

  I heard that Biden had confided (off the record) to the White House press corps that he wanted to run, but he added something like “You guys don’t understand these people. The Clintons will try to destroy me.” I’d gathered nuggets on a Draft Biden super PAC and some on-record quotes from donors, but the story was missing that final ingredient—confirmation from someone deep in the veep’s innermost circle. I was at LaGuardia awaiting a delayed flight to Miami to cover a Hillary speech on Cuban-American relations (a direct aim at Jeb!) when a Biden insider tipped me off that “something big” was coming on Sunday. The only other clue he dropped was to “ask Maureen.”

  I fled LaGuardia and started making calls in the cab. Maureen and Biden go back to the 1988 campaign and she knows his family and friends better than most. I didn’t know what she had, but I knew it would be good. As soon as her column posted, my story went up, weaving in Maureen’s scoop. “Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his associates have begun to actively explore a possible presidential campaign, which would upend the Democratic field and deliver a direct threat to Hillary Rodham Clinton . . .” It led the Sunday paper.

  Rather than seeing the op-ed and A1 story for what they were—a trial balloon by the Biden camp—Hillary interpreted our Biden reporting as another Times smear. She sent the message to all her top aides. Joel Benenson must’ve bitched me out for an hour. Maureen got it worse—in terms that Brooklyn would’ve called sexist, had they been directed at Hillary.

  “What is wrong with this woman?!” Huma wrote, when a press aide emailed Maureen’s column around.

  “Just when she’d seemed to quiet down . . .” Robby Mook replied.

  “She is full of self-loathing,” Jen Palmieri chimed in.

  “The front page article on Biden which was written off of only Maureen Dowd’s psychotic column,” Podesta wrote about my story. “They are worse than [Roger] Ailes.” Days earlier Podesta had described “getting fucked by the NYT” about a story by the Times’ Mike Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo that said the Justice Department had opened a “criminal referral” into Hillary’s handling of sensitive information on her private server.

  Even our own colleague, John Harwood, a Times contributor and CNBC correspondent, couldn’t resist piling on. I can’t blame him. It’s like Peter Fallow, the rumpled tabloid reporter in Bonfire of the Vanities, says, “If you’re going to live in a whorehouse, there’s only one thing you can do: Be the best damn whore around.”

  “Cannot believe Biden story is leading the paper,” Harwood wrote to Podesta. “It strikes me that ‘Biden is actively exploring’ is the new ‘criminal referral of Hillary Clinton’ if you know what I mean.”

  The only hitch? Both of those stories turned out to be true.

  Hillary’s contorting on issues like the Keystone XL pipeline and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that summer had nothing to do with Bernie and everything to do with Biden. If she could secure enough support from labor and lock up the black vote, the veep would see he had no path.

  When Bernie called Pete D’Alessandro to see if he would run his Iowa operation, he didn’t ask whether Pete thought he could win or how much it would cost to catch up with Hillary who already had dozens of offices and hundreds of staffers spread across the state. Bernie asked only this: “Do you understand my politics?”

  I kept thinking about that question. Do you understand my politics?

  I couldn’t imagine Hillary asking anyone that, and if she had asked, even her closest aides would’ve spent a few minutes trying to come up with the answer they thought Hillary wanted to hear.

  I sympathized with Hillary. She’d maintained a consistent set of beliefs over the years, rooted in her Methodist faith and the social gospel. “A progressive who likes to get things done” was how—in an off-the-cuff moment—she defined her politics in the first Democratic debate.

  But after four decades in politics she’d allowed the details to get so muddied that when she said, “Every child deserves the chance to live up to his or her God-given potential,” the words felt like such a safe political platitude that reporters joked she’d soon come out in favor of kittens and rainbows.

  But in those months of obsessing about Biden, while trying to keep Obama happy, she’d been forced to become a magician’s assistant, stuck in a box and twisting and turning to avoid the blades. She’d stood in a canary-yellow blazer in the un-air-conditioned gymnasium of the Amherst Street Elementary School and brushed off a question about whether she supported the Keystone XL pipeline.

  “This is President Obama’s decision, and I’m not going to second-guess him,” she said. “If it’s undecided when I become president, I will answer your question.”

  When that didn’t quite do the trick, aides spent the next couple of months debating how Hillary could come out against the project without appearing to split with Obama. “We are trying to find a good way to leak her opposition to the pipeline without her having to actually say it and give up her principled stand about not second-guessing the President in public,” her chief speechwriter, Dan Schwerin, wrote to Cheryl Mills. By September, Hillary told a community forum in Des Moines that she opposed the pipeline.

  Then there was the TPP, Obama’s signature trade deal. At the State Department she’d called it the “gold standard” of “free, transparent, fair trade.” But now that she needed organized labor to squeeze Biden out, Hillary decided the TPP didn’t meet her “very high bar.” Dan Schwerin said the goal of that tortured statement (“As of today I’m not in favor of what I have learned about it . . .”) had been “to minimize our vulnerability to the authenticity attack and not piss off the WH any more than necessary.” Mandy Grunwald wrote back, “This is so full of compliments, I can barely tell that HRC is opposing the deal.”

  Hillary wouldn’t even take a firm stance on whether women should split the bill on a date. “Look, I think splitting the cost on a date has to be evaluated on a kind of case-by-case basis,” she told Cosmo. “You know, many years ago I remember doing that and I know a lot of young people who even today do because they kind of consider more casual dates, group dates, to be ones where everybody pays their fair share. But I think you also have to be alert to the feelings of the person that you are dat
ing.”

  16

  The Ninnies

  Brooklyn, 2015

  Hillary told aides that she’d “stepped in it,” and not just stepped in it, but dug a foot in and rested it there so long that the stink just wouldn’t wear off. She blamed her staff for the ill-advised joke at the Wing Ding. “I look forward to your feedback (Also, if anyone has a funny email/server joke, please send it my way),” Dan Schwerin asked on an early draft.

  For me, the most disappointing result of the whole thing had nothing to do with the hyperventilating media or the FBI investigation or Hillary’s truly miserable mood for the next several weeks. Rather, it was that after the Wing Ding, Hillary suffered from a chronic inability to crack a simple joke. Voters never got to see Hillary’s “funny, wicked, and wacky” side, as Diane Blair had once described it.

  In private settings, which include closed-press fund-raisers and paid speeches to Wall Street banks, Hillary exhibited a dry, acerbic wit that didn’t easily translate into lines made for mass consumption on the campaign trail. In a Q&A with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Hillary relayed how, as secretary of state, she’d argued with a Chinese diplomat that his country had no more right to claim the South China Sea than the United States had to the Pacific.

  “But they have to take New Jersey,” Blankfein injected.

  “No, no, no,” Hillary said. “We’re going to give them a red state.”

  But on the stump, Hillary would insert pop-culture puns that stumbled off her tongue in unexpected, often painful, ways. During the Pokémon GO craze, she told a crowd in northern Virginia, “I don’t know who created Pokémon GO, but I’m trying to figure out how we get them to have Pokémon GO TO THE POLLS.”